In many industries and situations, such as food production, medical facilities, and the like, sanitation is a critical portion of a workflow to produce a product or provide a service. For example, when food is produced on food processing equipment, it might be desirable to remove many harmful pathogens from the food processing equipment in advance. Harmful pathogens might not always be apparent upon visual inspection. One solution is to clean the equipment such that it is unlikely that harmful pathogens could survive. For example, a meat processing plant might subject a piece of equipment to a high temperature washing process that uses steam to kill any bacteria or viruses that might be present. However, for some equipment or spaces, high temperature washing processes might not be feasible, such as when cleaning large equipment, walls, floors, etc. Where the equipment and surfaces cannot be subjected to a cleaning that definitively heats all portions of the equipment or surfaces, another approach is needed.
Equipment and spaces can be cleaned by the application of cleaning substances, such as liquid cleaners, possibly using cleaning devices such as cloths, scrubbers, etc. To test for the efficacy of a cleaning process, one might sample test areas of the equipment and spaces for particular pathogens. This might miss pathogens on areas that are not tested for or some pathogens that are not tested for. One approach might be to apply pathogens onto the equipment and spaces then test for them after the sanitation process, but this can be hazardous as it introduces pathogens that might not be eliminated.
In one approach, harmless pathogen surrogates are used, such as methods described in Zografos I. In some of those approaches, an abiotic pathogen surrogate is applied to surfaces prior to a sanitation process, then the equipment and/or spaces are tested for the pathogen surrogate to determine whether the equipment and/or spaces were adequately sanitized. However, this can lead to false negatives. A pathogen surrogate might be applied to some, but not all, of a surface, the entire surface sanitized and then some part of the surface tested post-cleaning for the presence of the pathogen surrogate. Even when the surface was not adequately sanitized, it might still show sanitization if the portions upon which the pathogen surrogate was applied was not the portions used for testing. This also can be a problem if persons involved in the sanitation process limit their cleaning to only those portions known to be tagged with pathogen surrogates.